Time’s up for the Yes2Rail blog, which I launched on June 30, 2008 as a paid consultant on Honolulu's elevated rail project. Yes2Rail’s August 13, 2012 post was its last following the author's move to Sacramento, CA. You’re invited to read four-plus years of information-packed entries, many of which are linked at our “aggregation site.” Look for the paragraph with red copy in the right-hand column, below. Mahalo for all the positive comments Yes2Rail received since its start.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

What Goes Together Like Love and Marriage? Mobility and Honolulu’s Elevated Rail System, Because 'You Can’t Have One without the Other'

Beansandrice,
catsanddogs, trafficandcongestion – they’re words
that naturally fit together like Love and Marriage in the 1950s hit song by
Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.

It’s an illusion to suggest
it can be done with managed lanes, bus rapid transit and/or at-grade rail
transit. At some point along their routes, each of these so-called alternatives require users to travel on or in competition with surface streets – and back to the traffic congestion they tried to avoid.

The only way to avoid it and
achieve unimpeded travel through town – we call it “mobility” – is to avoid
street-level travel altogether.

A subway on Oahu would be
ill-advised for cost, aesthetic and numerous other reasons, so rail transit
built above grade is Honolulu’s approach to restoring mobility, which is one of
rail’s four goals.

Another Pair

Populationandgrowth go together like Love and Marriage to produce ever-increasing traffic
congestion. “Try, try, try to separate them, it’s an illusion” the song goes,
because here’s the brutal truth:

Congestion is here to stay.
You can try to eliminate it, but “solving” traffic congestion is
as futile as pushing the proverbial boulder up the proverbial mountain.

“Traffic congestion tends
to maintain equilibrium. Congestion reaches a point at which it constrains
further growth in peak-period trips. If road capacity increases, the number of
peak-period trips also increases until congestion again limits future traffic
growth….”

Adding more lanes on
space-constrained Oahu isn’t ever likely to happen, but even if managed lanes
were somehow created – either by building new ones or excluding “unmanaged”
vehicles from existing lanes – the result would be the same, the studies say: “…without
congestion pricing (tolls), increasing road or public transit supply is
unlikely to relieve congestion….”

Trying to achieve mobility by imposing tolls for using managed lanes would violate another of rail’s goals
– to ensure transportation equity throughout the population. Only those with the means to pay the
tolls (or own a vehicle) would benefit from congestion pricing.

But going beyond these
obvious impediments, vehicles using managed lanes eventually would return to
surface level and be caught in traffic congestion that they avoided while on
the managed lane.

Anti-railer Randy Roth told a caller on a radio program who made that point “You’re flat wrong,” an assessment
that’s hard to square with his presumed analytical abilities as a law school
professor. What was he thinking? Of course they’d be caught in surface traffic!

So as songwriters Cahn and
Van Heusen concluded about Love and Marriage, you can come to only one
conclusion about mobility and grade-separated transit:

This Isn't Political

Yes2Rail is a blog about the Honolulu rail transit project, which has become the key issue in this year’s mayoral race. We comment on the candidates’ plans to address Oahu’s growing congestion problem and whether those plans could meet the need as well as elevated rail can and will. That’s not the same as criticizing the candidates, and we urge our readers to recognize the difference.

Another red-light runner meets Denver at-grade train, 6.13.12

Honolulu rail will be elevated, with zero possibility for accidents like those shown in this column in cities with at-grade systems. Visit our "aggregation site" for much more on why elevated rail is the only reasonable way to build Honolulu rail.

What riding the train will avoid

Bus Accident Aftermath on H-1

'Black Tuesday'--9/5/06 Crash Produced Nightmare Commute

Typical H-1 Traffic

About Me

After five years of active-duty service as an Army officer with duty stations in West Berlin and South Vietnam, reported and edited for newspapers and broadcast stations (including all-news radio) in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and Honolulu. Covered Honolulu city government for the Honolulu Advertiser and KGMB-TV. Served on Congressman Cec Heftel's staff in Honolulu and Washington, then managed corporate communications and was Hawaiian Electric Company's spokesman for nearly a decade. A communications consultant for 19 years before moving to California in 2012. Launched, produced and hosted Hawaii Public Radio's "live" weekly "Energy Futures" public affairs program in 2009-10. Authored books on The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific ("Punchbowl" 1982) and on the decline of standard grammar in business and society ("Me and Him Are Killing English!" 2007). Now an information officer with the California Department of Water Resources.